SEO Glossary: Referral Traffic

Links from other sources are important marketing and SEO signals

"Referral" literally means "reference", while "traffic" is the English word for "traffic". At the same time, traffic in search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical term for the influx of visitors to a website. Traffic is always good and desirable:

 

• Webmasters place advertisements, create value-added content and carry out other measures to generate traffic to their website.
• The crawlers of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Co. recognize the traffic and evaluate it as a positive signal, whereupon the website is rated better.
• High traffic, ideally paired with strong interaction with the page content, goes hand in hand with an improvement in the rankings of websites and individual subpages.

 

Advertisements are an example of a marketing measure designed to increase traffic. Despite the reference to websites, advertisements do not promote referral traffic, as they are limited in time from the outset and influenced by the advertising budget.

 

Referral traffic refers to all non-advertising traffic from external sources. If visitors are convinced by a website and, for example, share the link to the page in a chat with their friends, whereupon they visit the website, this is a case of referral traffic.

 

Examples of referral traffic from external sources

If the operator of an online store has its own Instagram channel and links from there to a product in its store, for example, the visitors coming via this link are referral traffic. It is therefore also considered a referral from a third-party source if the operator of a website itself links to its website from another platform.

 

Visitors who find a blog post or advice article helpful could share it in a forum. Forum users would be redirected to the post or article by clicking on this link. This is also an example of referral traffic.

 

If the managing director or another responsible person from a company is looking for a service provider in their region, they could search in the business directory. There he might find the entry of a company with a link to the website. If they visit the website via the link, there would again be referral traffic from a third-party source.

 

Measures to increase referral traffic

Increasing referral traffic is an essential part of marketing. In online marketing in particular, there are several specialist disciplines that deal with referral traffic. One of these specialist disciplines is off-page SEO. This is a sub-area of SEO and stands in contrast to on-page SEO.

 

While on-page SEO includes all SEO measures outside of your own website, off-page measures take place outside of the website. In off-page SEO, backlinks to increase referral traffic are the most important marketing measure.

 

Links from other websites: Backlinks are essential for rankings!

Backlinks are links that webmasters place to other websites. These external links lead from one website to another; they are therefore clearly referrals. Google and other search engines register these links and classify them as a recommendation.

 

It is assumed that the link to another website is made for quality reasons: The quality of the content on the linked page is high, which is why it is recommended to users. Especially when backlinks come from authoritative and frequently visited websites, they have an enormous influence on the ranking of the link recipient.

 

In link building, webmasters strive to obtain backlinks. To this end, they use various strategies and measures, e.g. registration in industry directories, buying links and publishing guest posts. In exchange for a guest post - i.e. an article written free of charge for a website - webmasters receive a backlink to their website.

 

Various SEO tools, such as Google Analytics and Sistrix, support the analysis of the backlink profile. The analysis can be used to identify optimization potential. Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, it is also possible to check the quality of existing backlinks.

 

Overview of further measures for more referrals

Website operators do not only receive referrals in the form of backlinks from other website operators. Although the generation of backlinks is an elementary component of SEO, the increasing popularity of social media in particular is creating even more opportunities.

 

Referrals from social media (including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) to websites attract new visitors. This referral traffic creates positive user signals that definitely have an impact on SEO. It is controversial how intensively links from social media are evaluated by Google and other search engines.

 

More and more attention is being paid to links from social media in SEO. These types of backlinks are often referred to as "social signals". Webmasters and SEO experts are occasionally preparing for a future strong weighting of social signals by search engine algorithms and are intensifying their marketing efforts in this area.

 

Another example of referral traffic is classic referral marketing. Sharing pages in private conversations in messenger apps or in direct conversations in the physical world also attracts new visitors to websites. However, this referral traffic is almost impossible to evaluate in the digital world, so it plays no role in online marketing.

 

Conclusion: What is referral traffic?

The most popular and most important example of referral traffic is visitors who arrive at a website via a backlink. They click on a link on a website, the link refers to another website - this reference is a so-called "referral". From a search engine optimization perspective, it is essential for the success of website and online store operators to continuously increase referral traffic through measures such as link building and social media marketing.